Album Review

Evan Cater [allmusic.com]

Stand Your Ground was the follow-up to South African pop band Juluka's first internationally distributed album, Scatterlings. It features the same original Afro-pop sound heard on the previous record, with lead singers Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu singing in both English and Zulu over keyboard-based '80s pop. For all its novelty, the Juluka sound varies little from song to song and begins to become a little tiresome by the end of the album. Hilton Rosenthal's production and Clegg's songwriting rely too much on rather tinny synthesizer backing and a call-and-response format between Clegg and the African background singers. Their bag of tricks is somewhat limited, but it does yield some fine results. The opening ''Kilimanjaro'' has a particularly memorable hook, and ''Work for All'' is a rousing plea for equity in employment: ''Papa sits alone in the kitchen/Thirty years a mining man/He still has to fight for the right to work/Whether the times are good or bad.'' Recommended to anyone who enjoyed Scatterlings.